Alchemy in Ancient and Islamicate Worlds

This course will survey the development of alchemy from its earliest forerunners in Mesopotamia to Ancient Egypt, Greek and Roman (Late) Antiquity, and its flourishing in the premodern Islamicate world. It will situate alchemy in its diverse contexts of practical crafts, natural philosophy, and cosmology, and ask how practitioners of alchemy related to the world through their craft. We will trace ideas and practices over more than two millennia (c. 1000 BCE–1500 CE) through sources including Babylonian fragments, the Leiden and Stockholm papyri, and Arabic alchemical recipe collections and handbooks. We will focus in particular on the emergence of a specialized discipline called alchemy or chrsyopoeia, how the imperative of secrecy influenced the transmission of alchemical knowledge, and the pathways through which such transmissions occurred between divergent linguistic traditions. The course will be taught in English.